KP Community Recipe: Mom’s sharlotka by Olya Loza
Hello, and welcome to today’s edition of KP Community Recipes, the (usually) monthly, midweek feature where I share a recipe from a member of the KP+ community.
I’m thrilled to have this space where we can share our stories and personal experiences, accompanied by a well-loved recipe that we’ve created, adapted, or inherited (or some combination of the above). Food is a thread that connects us all and I’m always fascinated by the stories and honoured to share them here.
ICYMI… Here are all the wonderful community recipes and stories we’ve had so far:
Quince Jam by Shadie Chahine @Shady_Kitchen
Salted date and marmalade treacle tart by @Annie Mae Herring
Upside down cakelettes by Alisha Mulhall
Today I have the privilege of sharing a beautiful piece of writing from KP+ community member Olya Loza. She generously shares the recipe for her “Mom’s Sharlotka”, along with beautiful hand-drawn illustrations. I got completely lost in this piece of writing, a tribute to what, and who, makes home home. I, of course, mixed up a sharlotka - it’s barely ten minutes effort for a gorgeous cake. Even though my batter was a bit thin (as kindly pointed out by Olya), it still worked out perfectly - this is a cake I’ll make again and again and I’m so grateful for that. Over to Olya.
Mom’s Sharlotka
A recipe and story by Olya Loza
My mom hasn’t worked outside of home since she had me, aged 26, away from her family and my dad’s family, in a tiny apartment in Riga, in a country still convalescing from the years it spent under the heel of the Soviet Union. But mom worked hard keeping our small household going. She cooked a meal every night, and there was always hot soup for lunch. She cleaned and tidied, she bought groceries, she took care of me, she made sure we never ran out of stuff. When dad got his job in Kyiv I was still very little, and he would leave for three, four weeks at a time. Mom looked after me and our beautiful black and white collie, Jerry.
We joined dad in Kyiv when I was six. I went to school, and dad went to work, and when we would get home there would be dinner, and often cake. Mom’s cakes are rarely very ambitious, but I don’t think she’s ever made one we didn’t like. She loved her adopted home, Ukraine, she loved the markets with produce from across the country, its rich black soil – chornozem – and different local microclimates producing such a vast diversity of crops. She’d often bake with fruits or berries that were in season, and she’d make jams and preserves every summer too, to see us through the winter. The apple cake below, sharlotka, is the one she would bake every autumn when we lived in Ukraine.
My parents left Ukraine after dad retired, three or four years ago – before the full-scale war. I’d already been gone for eight or nine years: I came to study in the UK when I was 16. Mom left neighbors she’d become friends with, the house, her garden, the tomatoes and the purple and green basil she had grown in big pots on the back porch, her summer kitchen: an induction burner on a granite counter on that same back porch. She still bakes sharlotka, though.
Mom, I love you. Thank you for all the sharlotkas you’ve baked, and for all the ones we’ve baked together, and for picking me up from school, and for the Kashtan ice creams we would sometimes get on our way from Demiivskyi market, you carrying at least two massive bags, me carrying a smaller bag and a straw basket – full of strawberries, or apricots, or peaches. Soft, squishy things, ripe and sweet with the hot July sun. Wish you could try the sharlotka I made this morning, mom. It tastes just like yours.
About the recipe:
Sharlotka is a simple cake: it takes 15 minutes to put together, most of which is spent chopping apples. It’s sweet and tastes of apples, that’s all, nothing else, and reminds me of the last weeks of summer holidays. The arrival of the fresh crop of apples and tiny sweet pears at the market would mark the approach of the new school year. There would already be a chill in the evening air, and we would buy notebooks and stationery and textbooks for school at the sprawling book market on the other end of the city, and in the evenings we would sit at the big wooden table on the back porch, now wrapped in blankets against the cool air, eating large slices of sharlotka, dad always with a glass of milk, mom always with hot green tea.
Sharlotka starts with apples. I’ve struggled with apples in the UK because there isn’t always a green grocer selling local varieties nearby, and the supermarket apples are abysmal, in my opinion. For this cake, please try to find some nice varieties, preferably a mix of sweet and tart, firm and softer. Whatever you do, don’t use Pink Lady (too firm, too sweet); if supermarket apples are the only ones available to you, I’d go with a couple Braeburns, a Granny Smith, a Golden Delicious, and a Bramley. I never know how any given apple will bake, and so I like to use a mix to mitigate this: some melt into the batter and become custardy, their sweetness melting into cinnamon-scented cake; other varieties maintain more of a bite, and stay a little tart.
I have never once used – or seen my mom use – a scale to make sharlotka. Today I baked it in a rental flat’s kitchen, waiting for my time away from home to pass, without what I thought was a right-sized pan or a scale, and yet it was probably the best one I’ve made outside of Ukraine. I had some really nice Irish apples, mostly red with some honey yellow and pale green sides, very crisp, though some started to go a little soft.
In a sense, this cake is the opposite of a “kitchen project”: it’s what you bake when you want a cake but don’t want to think about it very much at all. I haven’t tried changing, swapping or substituting anything in the recipe – nothing, not ever really. I’m sure it might be possible to make it fluffier, or more subtle perhaps, with the addition of whole wheat, buckwheat, or rye flour; or spices; or a different sugar-to-egg ratio. But I’ll never know, because for me, this cake exists simply as itself.
It is a quiet, tender cake. A cake bridging summer and autumn, being home and being away. But I wouldn’t call it a nostalgic cake; it’s not tethered to the past or frozen in time but part of the everyday, wherever I am, wherever mom is, wherever we can get our hands on a good crop of good, red apples.
The recipe
The cake usually yields two big slices for dad, one each for me and mom, twice – so I guess eight servings; but in my experience people here tend to have rather small slices of cake, so perhaps it will yield 10 or 11 portions for you.
Ingredients:
4 large apples, or 6 medium ones (most apples I come across in the UK are on the medium side, whereas in the US most (supermarket) apples are large)
4 eggs (medium or large – if large you might want to add a couple tablespoons more flour)
1 cup sugar, approximately 200g
1 cup flour, approximately 125g
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
Method
Preheat the oven to 180ºC (160ºC fan) and butter and flour a reasonably large (wide, rather than deep) cake tin. I never know what size my cake tins are. My mom definitely never knows this either. You’ll be okay as long as you don’t use the super small tins that are sometimes used for layer cakes. Oh and the smaller your tin, the taller you want the sides to be – there’s a lot of apples in this cake.
First, peel the apples (don’t if you’re not quite in the mood for it, or if your apples are thin-skinned; or peel only half of them), then cut them in half and core them. Cut each half in half lengthwise, then slice each quarter thinly. You don’t have to be very exact or consistent; a mix of thinner and slightly thicker slices is nice, because it’s nice to bite into firmer chunks of apple and have others melt completely into the cake. It’s also something you can vary depending on the apples you have (softer, mushier apples can stay in thicker slices) and what you’re in the mood for (complete surrender, juicy bites of apple, textural variety). Put the sliced apples in a bowl or leave them on the chopping board.
In the largest bowl you have, whisk four eggs with a pinch of salt, then add one cup of sugar and whisk some more. You want the sugar to dissolve and the mixture to look smooth and slightly paler, but you’re not trying to beat a lot of volume into it. You don’t need a mixer for this, just a good sturdy whisk. This takes a minute or so.
Then add a cup of flour, and one teaspoon each of baking powder and cinnamon, and gently fold in until no big lumps of flour remain (smaller ones are okay and will dissolve as you fold in the apples).
Fold in the apples (you’ll be glad you have your big bowl now). The mix will look like apples loosely bound with batter – not batter with a rare chunk of apple in it. You should think: Is this too much apple? (No.) If you’re not thinking that, consider adding another apple (don’t bother peeling at this point).
(additional note from Olya: if necessary add flour until it feels like thick but still fluid pancake batter)
That’s it. Pour the apple-y batter into the tin and bake. I start checking after 30 minutes but it’s usually done around the 45-minute mark (in fact, it’s very consistently done exactly at 45 minutes) – perhaps longer if your tin is quite deep. I use a strand of spaghetti (uncooked!) to check for doneness because I don’t always have cake testers or toothpicks on hand, but I always have spaghetti. It should quite easily pierce through the apples and come out with a few moist crumbs attached to it, if not completely clean.
Cool a little and cut yourself a big slice.
(I have never had to store this cake for longer than two-three days, but it keeps well for that time on the counter, covered with a clean kitchen towel or a big upturned plastic bowl.)